This is an interactive animation tool that uses the analogy of a dry-cleaning shop to help undergraduate and K-12 students grasp the concept of Buffer Overflow in computer systems. In the animation, customers drop off and pick up their laundry at the simulated shop, which has a series of hangers to provide a concrete mental picture of the sequential computer memory. Students are provided the opportunity to explore various scenarios and to understand at their own pace when buffer overflow causes harm and when it is silently ignored. The tool includes solutions to the buffer overflow problem, such as bounds checking and canary.
Please click the "click" button first to watch the introduction. In Scenarios 1 & 2, buffer overflow causes data to be overwritten. In the Lucky Scenarios 1 & 2, buffer overflow happens but no data is corrupted. In the Safe Scenario, no buffer overflow happens. In the Solutions scenario, the bounds-checking solution to avoid buffer overflow and the canary solution to detect buffer overflow are illustrated. The animation is explained in the following video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfgdwmrjnuo.
- Subject:
- Applied Science
- Computer Science
- Material Type:
- Interactive
- Provider:
- Scratch Foundation
- Author:
- Luis Oliveira
- Rachel Puckett
- Sherif Khattab
- Vinicius Petrucci
- Wonsun Ahn
- Zhen Wu
- Date Added:
- 05/15/2023